There is a photo in the family album, of me aged six or seven, wearing yellow shorts, crouched down on the lawn in front of the Palm House at Kew Gardens. Not long after, my parents bought a café and became self-employed, and we hardly had a weekend off together again. I’ve never been back since.
Thus it was that I was heady with excitement to re-visit, this time with my eldest, and the Palm House was the first place we went into. It’s a hot ’n’ sticky place (not a venue for a first date) and in among the endangered plants and ‘possibly the biggest pot plant in the world’ was the cacao tree. Although this was not a place to eat chocolate.
We got so overexcited by Kew (becoming members on the spot and already booked in for the magical Christmas lights), we walked about 25,000 steps pointing and sighing with delight. I was craving chocolate by the time we got to the gift shop. Montezuma was on sale. For a really long time Montezuma’s 51% Dark Side, £2.59, was my favourite dark milk and it was the bar that really introduced me to darker milks (thanks for that). I was never able to have its 35% Butter Nutter, £2.59 – a feast of milk chocolate and peanut butter – in the house, because it was impossible to stop eating it.
Although there were giant jars of buttons, which were tempting, this time I selected a mini bar of a new-to-me flavour Splotch: dark milk with butterscotch, £1.50. I ate it on the way home with sore feet and a heart full of greenery.
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